and the great world gallops off en masse to save itself—in the country while the trading, mercantile, and middling classes, who are compelled to remain, bethink themselves of their unrepented sins, and liberally subscribe for whitewash!
It is impossible to calculate how much human life might be prolonged—not only prolonged, indeed; but, what is of still greater importance, how much the condition of humanity might be improved in great cities—by legislative interference. It is melancholy to reflect how little has in this respect been done. One of the first, one of the surest, one of the most practicable methods of ameliorating the condition of the poor, is the amelioration of the habitations of the poor. Take two men; put one into a comfortable cottage—not one of your gimcrack, rose-encircled cottages, constructed to exhibit the taste of the landlord more than to administer to the comfort of the tenant, but a clean, snug, and commodious habitation. Locate the other in a pig-stye: the one will degenerate into a hog, the other will "learn to venerate himself as man." There is very little reasonable doubt, that if the design of Sir Christopher Wren for rebuilding the city of London, after the great fire, had been adopted, the value of human life in the metropolis would have improved; and it is equally certain that the plan for the regeneration of the city of Westminster, devised by the learned and talented Mr Bardwell, if carried into effect, would be a good measure of morality as well as of architecture. An avenue carried from the east end of Oxford Street through the "rookeries" of St Giles's into Holborn, would be a more effectual, safe, and permanent preventive of vice and crime, than if Meux's Brewery were converted into an enormous penitentiary, and a couple of juvenile thieves were to be suspended in terrorem over the principal entrance every morning before breakfast. The making easy, safe, and accessible roads, is the very first element of civilisation, and is no less applicable to the wilderness of London, than to the wilderness of the Mississippi. We venture to hope that the legislature may spare a little time from the squabbles of contending factions, and petty personal triumphs in debate, to devote to carrying out the Report of the Metropolitan Improvements Committee, if it were only for the novelty of the thing. It would be worth a statesman's while to give his best energies for once to objects practically philanthropical, than which nothing can be more so than an attempt to improve the habitations of the poorer classes of the inhabitants of the British Metropolis. We are far from having a desire to undervalue the benevolent exertions of those who labour to relieve the spiritual destitution of the London poor. Their task is a high and holy one, and their intentions must command the respect even of those who doubt the efficacy of their labours. The more we see, however, of human nature, whether in great cities or in the country, the more we are convinced that nothing can be done by the distribution of tracts for instance, by preaching in the open air, by visiting the poor at their wretched habitations, in comparison with the moral predisposition that may be induced by the less direct, but far more efficacious, system of improving first their temporal condition.
The prime essentials to human existence in crowded cities are pure water, pure air, thorough drainage, and thorough ventilation—which last are only applications of the water and the air—and last, though by no means least in importance, the facility of taking exercise within a convenient distance. Thus, every city has its public pulmonary organs—its instruments of popular respiration—as essential to the mass of the citizens as is to individuals the air they breathe. Paris boasts her Boulevards, her gardens of the Tuileries, her Champs Elysées, and her Bois du Boulogne,—Madrid, her far-famed Prado, where the monarch and the meanest of the people assemble to take the air, "their custom always of an afternoon,"—Rome, her spacious Corso,—Naples, her Mola and Strada di Toledo,—and last, Vienna enjoys her Glacis, no longer bristling with artillery, no longer enlivened with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," but crowded with a peaceful, gay, and happy population. Within our own islands, Dublin recreates her sons in the Phoenix Park, a spot unrivalled in its display of the softer features of rural scenery,—Edinburgh
